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So in MeeGo 1.0 we've worked quite a bit on performance and power optimizations (and it seems it pays off ...):
* We are using a gcc with Atom optimizations (backport from gcc 4.5 basically)
* We're using SSSE3 for floating point everywhere (-mfpmath=sse); quite some gain on Atom for floating point code
* We have an Atom optimized memcpy() in glibc (same for some related functions like memcmp etc)
* We've made sure that the environment variables are set so that normal apps that get compiled get the same CFLAGS as system RPMS get; likewise we've tried to make sure configure detects Atom correctly (there is some funky uname stuff in some configure scripts that get confused easily; don't ask)
* We've reduced OS overhead from background apps (if background apps take 1% cpu away, this costs both power and 1% performance for foreground apps)
* We've done a bunch of work on optimizing Qt (unfortunately, due to the 4.7 release dates, most of this did not make it into the 1.0 release)
* closely monitoring disk performance and working with btrfs upstream
(this is a balance between data integrity and performance. common sense data integrity wins of course)
* ... well many more little things all over the map to help performance

As the article says, there's still a bunch of work to be done, the compositor and graphics are clear areas of work for this.

MeeGo's OpenGL performance was actually the worst, which as aforementioned is likely attributed to its window manager. This, however, is bad news for anyone that is looking to use MeeGo on devices to play any accelerated games.

This isn't the whole story: the WM compositor is switched off when an app goes full screen, so full screen games should be just fine.

What I'd really like to see in a future Phoronix article is a benchmark of the most popular (and new) lightweight linux distros.

This would be very insteresting, especially if run on a real old computer (athlon xp and pentium4 are not old). Maybe a 486 or pentium? I know some lightweight distros are supposed to run on 486 hardware, but some don't even include boot floppy images (Deli Linux), so it's not easy to install them on such hardware.

My only concern with meego is installing software. I know there is the garage, but I suppose it's software library is not as extensive as ubuntu's. Can we still install software from other sources? What about the package format it uses? I've seen these same questions on the meego forum but no straight answer.

meego uses RPM. Older moblin was based on Fedora, meego still shares a lot in common with moblin. Basically, you may have *some* luck adding in Fedora repos.

Though my honest opinion is that this would be pointless. You would certainly be better off just installing Fedora and killing some services (possibly compiling a more streamlined kernel) and ending up with the same boot time (other performance is virtually identical).

there is thing on your computer called "power button", it's the same button you use to turn the machine on....... try it ;-)

It actually makes sense that way, but I think nowadays those who used to turn the computer off that way (DOS anyone?) have already forgotten about it. I know I did after 14 years of using the software button instead of the hardware one. So in conclusion, I think there should be some kind of help or tip for newcomers to meego to inform on the ways that meego is different from other OSes (including this little detail we're discussing).